Reading Files Across Servers

There are many ways to access data across servers that are shared on the same network. Depending on your setup will determine what is the best approach. It is possible to use the COM model to access the UNC as and authenticated user of that machine, i.e. machine name = CPU123, user = CPU123\user.whoever. The problem with this is approach is that if your servers are on different domains then is will be a huge headache to maintain all of those users, configuration file sounds like the best approach, but that will still yield a huge file. One app setting for each user. The approach I adopted was to use MSMQ and created a WCF service for sending messages to that queue and reading the state of the particular file using a FileWatcher. Worked well!